I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment. If we were truly all on the same page and freaking out, taking meaningful action would be a lot easier.
"I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment."
You do. Everybody wants clean air, clean water, etc. The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense.
The problem is people who see a short-term gain of their own, standing against the environmental problems they cause. They may not even believe the environmental problems exist.
Sometimes they're even right; just because someone labeling themselves an "environmentalist" claims some environmental problem exists doesn't mean they are correct. These people are probably as dangerous to the environment as the actual polluters. We don't actually have complete and correct information about the effect of things, and if we did, there's a lot of people who wouldn't want to hear it, on both "sides".
But you gotta solve the right problems. Probably a non-trivial component of the environmental movement's semi-effectiveness is how much of the movement wants to fight alongside Captain Planet against essentially non-existent threats, rather than working out how to address the mismatched incentive issue. But I say "semi-effective" because they're far from ineffective, and there are certainly people directly addressing the mismatched incentive issue. For instance, people discussing "carbon taxes" are definitely on a more effective path.
Drive SF to San Diego a few times a year and there are a few all along the route when going off the main freeway, more in rural areas, but present. See a few while bicycling through Santa Cruz mountains to west of San Jose, there's one house I regularly pass in Pescadero that has two - it only takes a few miles of driving outside of downtown Los Gatos to get to more rural areas.
I have a close friend who spent a lot of money so they could “roll coal” on people. Only one person, but he talks about it a lot. A lot.
He claims that he likes spewing this out onto people he doesn’t like. He’s never mentioned how awesome it is to pollute or anything. It’s the equivalent of spy hunter smokescreen.
Everybody wants _their_ own air and water to be clean. The problematic people are the ones who don't care if your water/air is dirty because it benefits them.
> You do. Everybody wants clean air, clean water, etc
The current US president* appears to want more coal to be burned and has denied climate change, as well as effected complete regulatory capture of the agency created to protect the environment.
>You do. Everybody wants clean air, clean water, etc. The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense.
Actually it's totally sensible and compatible with the actual actions of the various actors involved.
Companies continue to plunder the ecosystem in ways that knowingly damage it (fracking, rainforest depletion, etc), we have cheaper air fares than ever, every major company does only token moves while continuing the damages, and so on.
And of course for decades important agreements weren't signed because of financial interests...
A major segment of the US populace is supporting policy to remove all polluting regulations , dismantle the EPA, and would scream murder over a Carbon tax the same way “conservatives” in Canada are over Federal plans.
They’re not evil overlords cackling, but rather they’re in mass denial over a zero sum scientific equation, and have created a cult around their disbelief that’s as strong as any environmental group. If you understand science, from that sense, they’re definitely acting like tragic villains.
I wish it were so easy, that all environmentalists would need to do is admit they’ve overreached sometimes and been alarmist on the timeline etc, and people will see the reason in ideas like carbon taxes.
That’s not the experience I see out there. People are treating carbon taxes as the equivalent of communist invasion and an immoral affront to free society, rather than a conservative policy idea. (Similar to the healthcare debate)
I suppose there will always be people in the middle that could swing either way, they’re our main hope.
But I think it’s not helpful to scold “both sides” as you do above, equating over-eager environmentalists with those that want to accelerate our pollution and use of fossil fuels for short term gain. One is a misdemeanour, the other is quite literally contributing to global destabilization. Global warming in the next 75 years is leading to a wave of refugee immigration the world has never seen before (that a large segment of the populace also currently would reject and let starve). Germany has been poltically destabilized by 2 million Syrians. What happens when 1 billion or more are knocking on Europe and the US’s doors? I only wish I was overstating this for effect.
A carbon tax is really the only immediately workable and impactful solution to climate change. We can't flip a switch and have the change activists want overnight. That both parties have abandoned a revenue-neutral carbon tax (sell it to the people as a replacement for other taxes, like payroll, rather than a new tax) is of the worst policy realities we have found ourselves in.
"Green New Deal" is a bunch of hysterics going nowhere fast, and the counter point are a bunch of idiots that think a snowstorm is proof global warming doesn't exist.
We've lost the boring middle ground solution that works, just like so many other areas of policy.
One problem is that the public "sales pitch" for a new tax is almost always a lie when compared to what the money is actually spent on and loopholes and exemptions that are never disclosed up front. Nobody believes that a carbon tax will achieve or change anything other than taking more of their money.
But see, that's a misunderstanding of what a carbon tax is for. The federal government could burn that money and the carbon tax would still be effective. It's about pricing carbon into the market for goods and services, full stop. We are otherwise subsidizing our own self-destruction (or, more specifically, the heightened risk of destruction of our coastal cities, heightened risk of extreme weather, and forced migration of a billion+ brown poeple that live closer to the equator).
In other words, it absolutely is a money grab. That's the point!
Would it be better if that money went to useful programs? Absolutely! Same as the rest of our tax dollars.
That's why you pass it with a measurable, visible reduction in other taxes -- "revenue neutral"
Which is generally what Democrats don't want to do b/c its not raising taxes, and Republicans don't want to do b/c its not lowering taxes… but it'd sure go a long way to actually incentivizing heavy CO2 producers to change their ways that multilateral, international agreements have so far failed terribly at actually accomplishing anything about.
Freaking out is the opposite of what we need. I am not worried about the consequences being so severe we cant handle them, there are other quite scarier scenarios. Freaking out gives us the opposite of solutions,just a lot of noise and premature solutions such as focusing on inferior solutions such as solar.
This is the right way to do it, deal with the problems you see and can deal with.
Climate change is not a problem, it is a phenomena which have consequences. Some of them we see today some are 100 years into the future.
We don't know what the right solution for the consequences in the future is as we don't even know what the consequences are and we don't even know what the problems are going to be.
We can speculate but we can be wrong and so its much better to solve the problems we have today in ways we know how to solve and then invest in R&D to develop better solutions than to chase a future that might or might not be here.
Alternatively I fear the current scenario were people have panicked and spend more time arguing on the internet than actually doing anything constructive about the problems right in front of them.
That’s my point exactly, people don’t see a problem as they can’t compare our current situation with what it was like in the past.
We’ve completely and utterly destroyed nature, seas are empty, air was unbreathsble at some point, all oyster banks completely gone, most wildlife going extinct and people are asking “what problem”?
I am assuming you consider yourself part of "people" which means that you are subject to the same problem unless you believe yourself to be enlightened.
So the question still is what is the actual problem and how do you know it's correctly defined?
Wow, this makes me really sad. If you are so unable to see the problem I have no hope we'll ever fix this problem.
As I wrote in the top comment, I'm often surprised when reading articles which compare our current state with the past, the amount of life we've destroyed, the amount of pollution we're producing. So yes, subject to the same problem, but open to learning the facts...
You sound like the person that gets invited to a party, brings 100s of uninvited friends, completely trashes the house, kills a lot of the other invitees, and then is surprised when somebody thinks it's a problem:" you still have something resembling a roof, you can still sort of live here, what is the problem?"
